• Question: do you ever think "what if " after a science experiment?

    Asked by E_kelleher to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Always! “What if I do this…” “How will it change if I do that…”

      A lot of the time this leads to nothing, but very occasionally you can spark an entirely new area of exploration!

    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      The beauty of experiments is that there’s always more to do (though don’t get me wrong, this can be a little frustrating at times) so there’s always a question to be asked after each one. I always ask why it happened and what would happen if I changed something about the experiment I’d just done.

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      With every positive result I get I try to improve it, so I ask the question what if I do this?
      With every negative result I get I want to explore why it did not work. I had a meeting with my supervisor today, and after every comment he passed I was like: what if I do this? and what if I do that?

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Yes! When we get a result, the first thing we do if try and make sure it is what we think/hope it is, which means asking things like ‘what if the sample was dirty.’ ‘what if we had irradiated it for too long and it has decomposed,’ ‘what if the signal is due to the solvent.’

      This is why repeating experiments can be very important – you can answer a lot of those questions by doing an experiment more than once. It’s also good to think carefully and be careful in a lab so you don’t make mistakes to reduce the number of what ifs afterwards.

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